How to Analyze an Article to Write an Essay | Pen and …

As you can see, the opening paragraph responds to the prompt by taking a clear position, referring back to the issue briefly, and outlining the points that the essay will be addressing. Let your concise, informative opening paragraph set the tone for your essay, and look for an upcoming article on common flaws in Analysis of an Argument prompts!

One common type of essay is an article analysis essay

Analyzing Journal Articles & Essays - Oglala Lakota …

(31)Some of you may have taken the task as trying to summarize the primarythesis of the article in your own words. That is fine, provided yourown statement of the thesis does differ substantially from the sentencesprovided above. But a well-written argumentative essay will havea clearly-articulated thesis statement, and one need not to put in theextra work of trying to figure out what the central point is that the authoris trying to communicate. Thesis statements makes things easier onthe reader, which is one of the primary communicative goals of good writing at least in philosophy (mystery authors may have different goals).

Analyzing Journal Articles & Essays

We are reading this article not for its content although I expect it to be of interest to many of you, especially thecriminology majors  but as an illustration of how to think in terms ofarguments. That is, we shall be using this article as a way of illustratingsome of the key concepts brought out in the previous lecture. Further,this essay can serve as a model of the kind of writing I expect you tobe doing in your essays (with some important caveats that I will mentionat the end of this lecture).

How to Analyze an Article the Right Way - Essay Writing

Is it justifiable?~If you truly understand these structures as they interrelate in an article, essay, or chapter, you should be able to empathically role-play the thinking of the author.

Analyzing a Newspaper story How is a Newspaper Article Structured

One important difference has to do with the use of empirical claims. The essay weve read is a popularized scientific article, written by socialscientists. They can back up their claims with empirical research,much of which has actually been conducted by the authors themselves. In this class, we are not qualified to make such empirical assertions. This presents a problem. For example, the above burden I mentionedinvolves an empirical claim, a claim that we are not in a position to eitherassert or deny. Sometimes in writing your papers, your argument willdepend on such empirical claims. How ought you to proceed? Well, insofar as your argument depends on empirical claims, flag the factthat you are making an assumption. That is, flag the fact that yourthesis can only be provisional or conditional  for example, you can saythings such as, if this claim is correct, then Another important difference has to do with the introduction. The article youve read was written as a public-interest piece for a general-audiencemagazine. For such pieces, it is often a good idea to start withan attention-getting story as a way of introducing the subject matter. In an academic piece, on the other hand, introductions are all business.